YMMV, I guess. I didn't experience any cognitive dissidence when the Enterprise showed up at the end of Season One, partly because I was caught up in the plot and the excitement of them running into Pike, and, honestly, because it looked enough like the old Enterprise enough to be immediately recognizable to me. I wasn't counting the decks or comparing it to some old screen captures from "The Cage."
Well, I thought that scene was terrible, but I assure you, I would've thought it was just as terrible if they'd pulled the 11-foot model out of the Smithsonian and filmed that. However, the fact they didn't (you know, metaphorically) contributed to my feeling that the show was flailing badly with that ending. Nobody seems to know what Discovery is supposed to be, where it's going, what its themes or interests are. A show that knew what it was about would not end its season two minutes early, spend ninety seconds standing awkwardly with its hands in its pockets, then say, "Oh, look, the
Enterprise! They're probably doing something interesting! We'll figure out what that is and get back to you, see you next year!" and then cut to black, and a show that had a healthy relationship with its forebearers wouldn't be updated for modern audiences visually at the same moment it was going full-retro homage on the soundtrack. It's not about Discovery not matching with TOS, it's about Discovery not matching with itself.
Look at the opening to tonight's episode ("If Memory Serves," for people reading the thread in the future), and then the episode itself, for another perfect example of what I'm talking about. Is Star Trek ridiculous camp that occasionally stumbles upon profundity, or Serious Business that knows how to have fun? I have an answer, you have an answer, they're probably different, and that's fine. The problem is that Discovery doesn't have an answer. I'm not sure it even understands that there's a question.
And when was it ever stated that Burnham and Spock could never meet? Hell, they teamed up in the very first DISCO novel which came around the same time the show debuted. And, yes, I know the books are not "canon," but that suggests that Spock was never intended to be off-limits or whatever.
That's
exactly what it suggests. Why would the Bryan Fuller propose a premise for a novel that he anticipated using on the show? The whole idea was to keep the tie-ins out from underfoot by having them do things the show wouldn't or couldn't. If the show had expected to explore Burnham and Spock's relationship in any detail, at all, ever during the run of the show, that's the last thing they'd ask for a novel about, since it'd be asking for early-installment weirdness that was destined to be contradicted.
The shows takes place at a point where we know Spock is serving with Pike, so why not use him, why not give him a sister? It's a STAR TREK show. You expect connections to STAR TREK. And of course they're going to use Spock instead of, say, Janice Rand because Spock is and has always been one of Trek's most famous characters, and Burnham gives you a whole new angle so you're not just retreading the same old ground where Spock and Vulcans are concerned. It's new and familiar . . . which is the needle any successful revival needs to thread if it wants to attract enough eyeballs to survive.
I'm pretty sure all Star Trek: Discovery needs to attract enough eyeballs to survive in the streaming age is the first eight letters of the title, for better or worse. And there was a time when a Star Trek show could get a jump-start on the strength of the premise, or even the brand, to get really commercial. That time, of course, being about fourteen months ago.
I don't have an objection to Michael being Spock's foster sister. My problem is that that became the thin edge of the wedge in turning Discovery into the Young Spock Show, and it certainly looks like that happened because somebody thought that since audiences like Spock, he should be the most important person in space (insert Christopher's point about confusing what the audience thinks with what the characters think here) so people will tune in, and not because there was a new story that had to be told about Spock and they just couldn't let it pass by.
You just have to remember that these are TV shows , not historical documents, and allow for a certain degree of artistic license. Believe it or not, I can still watch TOS episodes without any "dissonance" because I understand that, in real life, they were filmed fifty-plus years ago, long before DISCO was a gleam in anybody's eyes. I don't expect it to look like DISCO any more than I would worry about why some BEWITCHED episodes are in color and some are black-and-white . . . or expect an in-universe explanation for the change.
Great, so neither of us would've squandered half of Rebecca Romijn's first appearance on "Why are there no holograms in TOS?"
Again, my point is you can be slavish or you can be revisionist, and there are merits and drawbacks to both, but for Pete's sake, just pick one and stick with it.
. But I knew in reality that wasn't going to happen. I know it's a different thing when you're talking about an entire series as opposed to a single episode or two. 
